Giant Reed Grass, or Arundo donax, and bamboos have long been recognized as important non-wood industrial biomass-producing plants that can be grown on a wide variety of soil types and in a wide range of climatic conditions. Arundo donax is a perennial member of the grass family and has an appearance somewhat like bamboo or sugar cane. Arundo donax reaches maturity in about a year, can be harvested annually, and produces usable fiber at a rate of more than twenty-five times that of timber. Over 20,000 plants can be grown in a standard acre of land (approximately 208 feet long by 208 feet wide). Arundo is extremely hardy, has few natural enemies, and grows in poor soils without fertilizer and very little rainfall. The plant flourishes in warm climates and is a very efficient converter of the sun's radiation into biomass. Once established, Arundo grows like bamboo—spreading its roots and producing a number of new shoots. Mature stalks grow to an average height of twenty-five feet and an average diameter of one inch. Arundo stalks can be processed and chipped at the harvest site, and are amenable to storage due to a natural waxy coating on the stalks. Fifty thousand hectares of Arundo produces as much usable fiber as 1,250,000 acres of trees.
Arundo can be processed into particles to make paper products and particle boards by methods known in the art. See, for instance, WO 99/66119, which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference. In addition, both Arundo and bamboo can be used to generate heat and make fuel such as ethanol, as well as for food, phytoremediation, and carbon sequestration.
Bamboo, on the other hand, is one of the most universally useful plant commodities known. Bamboo provides food, raw material, shelter and even medicine for the greater part of the world's population. The fibers of bamboo are long, thin and of high quality. They are many times better and stronger than wood fiber. With good physical and mechanical properties, and low shrinkage, they are ideal for many industrial applications. They can be used, inter alia, to make particleboard and oriented-strand board. They are an excellent source of fiber for making paper pulp. Like Arundo, bamboo can be burned to generate heat and make fuels such as ethanol.
The major factor that has limited Giant Reed Grass and bamboo utilization has been the cost of planting and availability of planting material when attempting to establish large plantations. Before the development of the present invention, plants for plantation establishment were usually dug and moved by intensive manual labor. This also required a large stock of wild planting material to be available near the desired plantation site and also locally available, low-cost labor. Very few plantations have ever been established due to these restrictions, even though the commercial potential of these plants was well known since the early 1900's. In essence, this invention solves the major problems restricting the use of these plants as a large-scale feedstock for the industrial production of, as examples, paper pulp, fuel, and food and building materials.
The availability of these non-wood fiber resources provided by the present invention has a tremendous impact on the wood fiber situation worldwide. The present invention provides for the first time methods of successful plant culture and plant regeneration via somatic embryogenesis utilizing vegetative explants from Arundo donax plant parts. In addition, the present invention provides for the first time methods for the non-aseptic mass macropropagation of bamboo and Arundo, which reduces labor requirements and overcomes a lack of plant stock material at the industrial site. Thus, the present invention succeeds in eliminating major barriers restricting large-scale biomass plantation establishment of bamboo and Arundo. In the case of Arundo, for instance, 22 million plants, enough to plant 18,000 acres, can be produced and planted efficiently in one year with the present invention, requiring 113 laboratory, nursery, and plantation workers working forty hours per week. With conventional propagation systems, a labor force of 5,023 people working 365 days might be able to accomplish this if the plant stocks for vegetative division were available. The plant stocks required would be about 6 thousand acres in size. No known stocks of this size are currently available in the United States.